Dead Kid Harvester is a solo avant-garde/experimental/noise artist with a complete disregard for any form of music convention such as harmony or tempo. The primary instruments used are vocals and kitchen utensils. The life of a song typically begins with the lyrics, written with no consideration for rhythm or beat. Dead Kid Harvester takes influences ranging from doom metal to drone, industrial and old school punk, and polarizes them into an industrial cacophony of noise. Recorded samples and segments are combined haphazardly into songs, with frequent use of pitch shift and time stretch effects.
Dead Kid Harvester was founded in Porirua, New Zealand in December 2000, later moving to Auckland. The name Dead Kid Harvester is a combination of two nicknames acquired at high school, and is no less off-putting than the music itself. The preferred lyrical themes are insanity, horror and philosophy. Dead Kid Harvester makes use of both jarring and subtle variations between channels to invoke uneasiness and disarray.
In 2018, after nearly ten years of recording and procrastination, the debut full-length album The First Sign Of Madness was finally completed.